Given the enormous amounts of political and emotional effort, as well as
increasingly scarce public cash, given over to justifying and building bikepaths
in the name of urban ecology, I think it is worth asking whether that effort and that
money are, in fact, actually useful or beneficial.
People often presume that you have to build bikepaths
before you can use bicycles effectively for urban transit.

However, there already exists an intricate and
comprehensive system of bikeways that extends
throughout the length and breadth of every urban
agglomeration on earth, and it is called "city streets."

Rather than pour money into glorified sidewalks that, as
someone once said of yachting, "go slowly nowhere at
great expense," or into putting up signs that are ignored
by motorists and bicyclists alike, spend it wisely on
educational programs that will teach bicyclists (who are
people on bicycles) how to ride safely and politely in
traffic, and that will remind motorists (who are people in
cars) of their obligations in regard to the rights of
cyclists.

Three major statistical studies have shown
that bicyclists on separate bikepaths have an accident rate
over two and a half times higher than that of bicyclists on
the street. (These studies were commissioned by the
AAA, by the CHP, and by a bicycle advocacy group; all
three came to the same conclusions. See John Forester's Effective Cycling at your local bookstore or library.)

The experiences of
thousands upon thousands of real-world riders show that >riding in traffic, as traffic, is the safest way to use a
bicycle for transportation. People who use separate
bikepaths are impeded from learning the skills they need
to use their bikes on the streets, which is the only way to
use bikes effectively to get to places you need to get to in
a reasonable time. The same studies also show that the
majority of accidents that did occur--most of them
involving cars failing to yield right-of-way to bikes, or
bikes turning inadvertently in front of cars--are of types
that could be addressed by educating the parties involved.

There is also an interesting financial perspective. Accounting
studies have shown that the taxes currently imposed on
motor vehicles in this country do not cover the actual
costs of maintaining an infrastructure of roads, signals,
police services, etc. etc. that motor vehicle use requires,
let alone the social costs relating to pollution (and its
abatement), congestion (and its accommodation), the
obliteration of open land for parking, storage, and
maintenance facilities, the destruction of neighborhoods
for freeways, the isolation imposed on individuals by car
usage and on neighborhoods by road configurations,
individual health degraded by car-required sedentarism,
and so forth and so on, and on, and on. (Mark E. Hanson, "Automobile Subsidies and Land Use,"
Journal of the American Planning Association, vol.
58, No. 1,1992, pp. 60-71, among others.)

Therefore,
bicycles, which use an infinitesimal share of the
infrastructure, are charged disproportionately in their use
of the same. To put it bluntly: in a literal financial sense,
I own more of the road when I am riding on it on my
bicycle than when I am driving on it in a car.

The historical perspective also supports the rightful place of bicycles on
the common roads: the roads and
highways system in this country was originated in
response to the "Good Roads" movement of the post-Civil
War decades. This movement was a program of
bicycling groups of the time, who were tired of riding on
bumpy wagon paths. Bicycles were considered largely as
transportation then, and the roads were originally
improved to facilitate bicycle use. Car culture unfortunately owes the ease of its
development in part to bicycle culture.

In a realistic global sense, cars simply do not have
primacy over bicycles. Bicycles move more people and more goods
than any other form of land transportation now in use
worldwide, and more bicycles are in use worldwide
than any other vehicle (presently about 900,000,000).
Bicycles are essential to the economies of China, India,
Southeast Asia, and Africa, and to the cultures of
Northern Europe. In Holland, one of the most civilized
of countries (as well as one of the coldest and wettest),
bicycles are used for 29% of all personal transportation,
and they are heavily used in Germany, Scandinavia,
France, and Italy, as well as in North American cities
such as New york, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco,
Toronto, Seattle, and Portland--places with some of the
worst weather on the continent.

In other words, the roads are the safest place to be once you learn
how to use them, and "they" owe us our place in the lane anyway. Let's
direct our efforts to making the roads more available to bicyclists,
and bicyclists--ourselves--more able at using the roads. Learn how to ride safely,
learn how to carry groceries, learn how to forgive the ill-mannered drivers who
have not yet learned that to be slow and exposed can also mean to be free
and alive. Almost everyone out there in those tin boxes is a potential bicyclist.
It's up to you to show them that it's not only beautiful, but feasible. The
emphasis on bikepaths tells people that they can ride only on bikepaths.